The numbers for homeland security grant money for fiscal year 2006 are out, and while the budget for the program was cut by $120 million, nearly all of that cut was absorbed by New York and Washington, D.C. Now the politicians are out crying to the press because they won’t get all the pork-barrel projects

Back in the days of the Cold War, spies found ingenious and unusual ways to communicate with each other, hiding their communications in plain sight, whether encrypted or not. For instance, an intelligence agent (spy) might contact his case officer (handler) by placing an ad in the personals section of the local newspaper. This practice,

The U.S. Supreme Court ruled Tuesday that government employees who speak out aren’t always protected by the First Amendment. In the 5-4 decision in Garcetti et al. v. Ceballos, the Court ruled that government employees are not protected by the First Amendment when they speak about matters pertaining to their jobs.

If you want something done right, they say, you have to do it yourself. That seems to be the attitude of members of the Minuteman Project who began construction of a 10-mile section of fence on the Arizona border with Mexico Saturday. The fence section will be made of barbed wire, razor wire and steel

Government employee unions are fighting tooth and nail any attempt to overhaul government personnel systems to pay employees based on performance, rather than just being listed on the payroll. And in the Department of Homeland Security, where it could be argued that such a system is desperately needed, the unions have won again, putting homeland

Veterans Administration officials told Congress on Thursday that a department employee had been routinely taking home data on over 26 million veterans for over three years before it was stolen from his house in an apparent burglary May 3. Jim Nicholson, Secretary of Veterans Affairs, said that he was not notified of the theft until

The federal government is a slow, stupid, plodding bureaucracy which can’t respond quickly to anything. And if you’re counting on them to save you when the next hurricane hits, you may well find yourself dead. A Department of Defense official told Congress Thursday that DoD and Homeland Security need as much as a week to

If you received a phone call from the Middle East and, when done, proceeded to make telephone calls to other people within the U.S., you just might be a terrorist, according to a report on the National Security Agency’s telephone record collection program. USA TODAY reported Monday that the NSA used the telephone records of

The Federal Emergency Management Agency is not fully prepared to respond to a major natural disaster due to staffing shortages and does not expect to be fully staffed until sometime in July, officials said Wednesday. A continued lack of coordination with state and local officials on evacuation procedures and a levee system not ready for

After the release earlier this month of five ethnic Uighurs who were being held in Guantanamo Bay despite not being enemy combatants — or involved with terrorism at all — four more people known to be innocent remain imprisoned there. And I’m not just saying they’re innocent. That’s what a military tribunal which heard their